Ranking Under Duress

The Guardian recently put out a poll asking readers to nominate the greatest novels of all time: what would occupy the top of your list, the sacred top three, the books you’d take to a desert island or rescue if your house were on fire?

I admit I love this kind of thing. Maybe because after enough exposure to the daily weather system of horrible news, each headline arriving with the by-now familiar atmosphere of low-grade apocalypse, it feels good to remember that life extends beyond the narrow bandwidth of the present tense; that the new order of things, however infernal it insists on becoming, has not yet annexed everything.

So here goes: my top ten novels of all time (three simply wouldn’t do), an almost impossible task – not only choosing but ranking them – liable to change with weather, mood, planetary alignment, and whatever obscure sentence happens to ambush me next time around, but worthwhile all the same. (It was only after writing it down, and with some embarrassment, that I realized I had forgotten one major novel. Since removing any of the others now felt both impossible and faintly disloyal, the list has become an ungainly top eleven instead of a top ten. Statistical purity, it seems, was never really an option.)

11. In Search of Lost Time – I know. I know. I know. By all accepted protocols this should probably occupy the top position, glaring reproachfully downward at everything beneath it. But since I still have not, to this day and age, found the time (yes, yes, the irony remains available to all) to read it in full, it seemed dishonest to place it any higher. Yet even in fragments, and despite prolonged intervals between volumes, it feels impossible to leave out – as if it already carries the rumeur des distances traversées, even when only half-read.

10. The Magic Mountain – Much as I liked Death in Venice (read during a trip to antebellum Syria) and the Doctor Faustus, this was the one that lingered. A novel that somehow converts suspension into movement, where people speak, fall in love, eat (prodigiously!), speculate, fall ill and die, and time itself – stretched into waiting, and waiting into a form of life – becomes the main event.

9. Light in August – During Covid I went through a Faulknerian campaign, reading all of the major novels in succession. Another could have occupied the spot, but this was the one that remained: for its heat, its violence, its tenderness, and because few novels convey so well that people are simultaneously condemned to history, haunted by the impossibility of fully knowing themselves, and yet absurdly free within it.

8. The Scarlet Letter – Amid all the spiritual darkness, surveillance, punishment, and public choreography of guilt, there appears that brief opening in the forest: one of those small utopian clearings literature occasionally grants us before withdrawing the offer. The fact that it doesn’t last only makes it more compelling.

7. The Ambassadors – “I remember the palace...” (burned to ashes by the Communards) and, of course, “Live all you can.” I’ve always liked reading those two lines together, perhaps because they seem to pull in opposite directions and somehow arrive at the same destination: memory and experience, possibility and deferment, the life examined and the life squandered. A socialist’s compromise with luxury.

6. Lord Jim – While Heart of Darkness (though more novella than novel) is without doubt Conrad’s greatest achievement, and while Victory may have given me more immediate pleasure, Lord Jim stayed, particularly the sequence around Stein, the butterflies, and “the destructive element”. Less comfortably, it made me aware of certain Bovarystic tendencies of my own, to the point that, if forced into the old cliché of naming a book that changed my life, this would most definitely be the one.

5. The Charterhouse of Parma – The breathtaking pages describing the coulisses of Waterloo alone would justify its place here, but everything afterward is just pure delight. Like James, Proust, and Mann, Stendhal here deploys a temporality in which duration resists the imperatives of plot, making room for delay, digression, detour, experiential excess – a life not yet fully disciplined into (narrative) efficiency.

4. Under the Volcano – Intoxication, failure, history approaching from a distance (the Spanish Civil War and the spread of fascism looming behind the action and between the lines), revolution raging “in the tierra caliente of each human soul”, and then all at once private ruin and collective catastrophe becoming indistinguishable. Few novels make consciousness feel so crowded, so simultaneously lucid and doomed. And then there is Lowry’s language: incantatory, allusive, endlessly digressive, yet somehow always under exact control. On a trip to Mexico last year, many years after reading it, the Consul – alongside Eisenstein, Rulfo, and Arturo Belano – was constantly with me, as if the book had spilled beyond its covers and carried its feverish logic into the textures of the journey itself.

3. Ulysses – I read it the year my son was born, eleven years ago. What began as another title from the long civilizational checklist of “books one must read before dying”, became unexpectedly one of the great reading pleasures of my life. Every morning before dawn I would advance slowly through a dozen pages: coffee beside me, baby and cat distributed across my body in no particular hierarchy. And somehow Joyce, despite all the noise about difficulty and genius, turned out to be astonishingly companionable. For a while afterward, it became difficult to imagine wanting to read anything else.

2. Huckleberry Finn – First read at twenty, in college, then returned to a few times over the years, most recently aloud to my son. And each time I let myself be seduced by the same passages: the egalitarian raft-community of Jim and Huck, adventurously drifting through the night; smoking, chatting, drinking coffee by day – temporarily exempt from the laws of “sivilization”. One of my favorite images of “utopia amid overall disgrace” in all literature.

1. Don Quixote – Not only for affective reasons (my father used to read parts of it to me when I was a child) but because I increasingly suspect it really is the greatest in almost every register available to the novel: funniest, freest, strangest, most generous, most hospitable to contradiction. Contestatory without dogma, melancholic without resignation, utopian without innocence. Every great novel after it feels, at least occasionally, as though it knows it is arriving late to something already accomplished in the early seventeenth century.

P.S.– No, Dostoyevsky won’t be making an appearance in my top eleven. I realize this may sound like heresy to some, but, for all his greatness, he has never quite been my cup of tea (I’m still to read The Idiot, though). I also remain, somewhat shamefully, outside the orbit of War and Peace and The Man Without Qualities, both of which I intend to enter sooner or later, pending whatever improbable alignment of time, discipline, and planetary indifference makes such entries possible. And yet, once one begins to think in terms of lists, exclusions, and accidental hierarchies, the borders start to loosen. A top eleven is already a kind of compromise with overflow; a top 101 would, of course, dissolve into something closer to a map of compulsions than a canon. In that expanded, and frankly uncontrollable, version, Kafka and Machado de Assis would appear immediately (how did they fail to make the cut at all?) alongside The Savage Detectives (remembered less as a book than as a kind of call to life), Vineland, The Lost Steps, Hopscotch, The Time of the Hero, Father Goriot (read in two days, as if in a fever), The Waves, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (once upon a time my absolute favourite), Journey to the End of the Night (which accompanied me somewhere around my thirtieth year like a kind of diagnostic instrument), The Thief’s Journal (same around my twenty-fifth), Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, For Whom the Bell Tolls (not Hemingway’s finest, perhaps, but the Spanish Civil War always exerts its own gravitational pull upon me)… and so many others that any attempt at closure begins to feel arbitrary rather than descriptive.

Beauty and Innocence in a Damaged World

Artemis II Through a Child’s Eyes

“And the man who made Iris the child of Thaumas was perhaps no bad genealogist.”

My eleven-year-old is daydreaming about the Moon. Thinking of what stands behind the new lunar flyby, I first wanted to say – as Max Horkheimer in 1956 – that I couldn’t care less about sending a spacecraft to the Moon. But I quickly found myself drawn into the same orbit, quietly following his attention, the spark in his eyes. To share in that excitement is not indulgence; it is a small suspension of the closures that accumulate with age. In his fascination, the world remains provisionally open, the low expectations of the present day not yet naturalized. To accompany him there is not to shield him from reality, but to preserve, within it, a space where other scales of thought and desire can still be rehearsed. I watch him, and in doing so, I am reminded that the shape of things is not yet fully fixed; it can still be imagined differently, still malleable a little longer, if only from where he stands, before it hardens again.

One can, as Brecht insisted in another context, still speak of beauty amid injustice, but only by striking the dissonant note. The rocket rises, its brightness briefly overwhelming what persists below; the world remains out of joint. The sentiment that “we are all Earthlings” has a certain resonance when viewed from orbit, but it leaves intact the distribution of who is housed, who is protected, and who is left to absorb the shocks – of poverty, war, displacement, and an increasingly volatile climate. Most of humanity remain exposed – always have.

And yet, if he is captivated by Artemis II, this is not something to be corrected by an early introduction to astronomical budgets, fraught geopolitics, and shady corporate agendas. The prospect of space exploration pushes the boundaries of the imaginable; it continues to project mankind as a single, if abstract, collective. Against a background of utter fragmentation and managed scarcity, it carries a utopian charge that exerts a stubborn pull. It offers, however briefly, a standpoint from which identification can exceed borders and circumstances, as if, for a moment, they might be set aside, returning us to Earth under a different description: not as a patchwork of jurisdictions and control, but as a shared and finite habitat, turning slowly in the dark.

As we watch the Moon-bound capsule leave Earth behind, I do not speak to him of the interests that converge on the “peaceful” use of outer space, nor of the familiar actors who debate the extension of property relations beyond the atmosphere. Nor do I pair, alongside the spectacular views, the catalogue of terrestrial emergencies and catastrophes that define the present – fires, floods, and the slow violence of unaffordable housing and health care – all of which form the persistent background of adult knowledge and contrast sharply with the pseudo-urgency of revisiting our natural satellite.

Even as we marvel at the mission’s planetary sweep, it remains embedded in political economy. It presupposes (and demonstrates) the existence of extraordinary capacities: vast resources, accumulated knowledge, coordinated institutions, and long planning horizons. “Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of”, said one of the astronauts. The issue, however, is not whether large-scale action is within human reach, but under what conditions, and to what ends, it is undertaken.

The thing is not to oppose wonder with critique, nor to sequester critique in order to preserve wonder. Wonder opens the world; it marks the sense that what exists is not exhaustive of what could exist. But left to itself, that impulse is easily folded back into narratives that celebrate capacity while leaving its distribution untouched. If the coordination and ambition required to send humans around the Moon and safely bring them back are clearly within our reach, why are they applied so selectively?

Wonder – what Plato and Aristotle name thaumazein – need not be an escape from reality. It can be the threshold of a more exacting engagement with it. I hope my eleven-year-old will continue to look at the Moon with the same openness, holding onto that interruption, even as he begins to see the world’s uneven ground beneath it.

Residual Revolution

The Quiet Politics of Vineland and One Battle After Another

When Thomas Pynchon published Vineland in 1990, the novel read as a post-Reagan elegy for the long twilight of the ’60s, populated by ex-radicals, countercultural communes, and a society that had learned to domesticate dissent. Thirty-five years later, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, his loose, fever-bright adaptation of Vineland, feels tuned to our late-digital moment: a vision of political disillusion refracted through cinematic spectacle.

One Battle After Another has been justly praised on many fronts: for its storytelling, plot construction, pacing, and blending of multiple tonal registers (political satire, action thriller, noir comedy), as well as for the profound humanity of the main characters, so vividly rendered that even the worst of them, the cruel and despicable Col. Lockjaw, elicits a fleeting sense of empathy by the end , which is not the case with the even more vile and obnoxious “Christmas adventurers”.

The cast, to be sure, delivers career-best performances, breathing life into every nuance. And visually, the film is indeed a feast, filled with arresting vistas and breathtaking sequences  – from the opening border-wall tableau to the final car chase, with the camera arcing and plunging like a surfer chasing a monstrous wave –, all crafted with artistry and bound together by Jonny Greenwood’s astonishing score, which functions not merely as accompaniment but as an interpretive force in its own right.

And yet, critical reservations have emerged, particularly regarding the film’s depiction of revolution and political action, and the ambiguity of its moral centre; reservations that open a window onto its dialogue with Vineland.

Pynchon’s novel is a sustained meditation on lost revolutionary potential and how remnants of that energy might still be tapped at a time of political exhaustion. Set in 1984, it continually flashes back to the ’60s counterculture, where spectral figures  ( the Thanatoids ) are haunted by the defeats of that era’s radical movements. By contrast, One Battle After Another has been criticized, particularly from a leftist perspective, for transforming political longing into spectacle, turning resistance into mere display. In this view, revolutionary desire becomes kink or stylistic flourish rather than collective orientation, obscuring the subtler, enduring political currents that Pynchon cultivates.

Such a binary  – the power of memory versus the seduction of spectacle  – misses the deeper continuity between the works. Vineland reflects a moment of disillusionment. Pynchon looks back at the ’60s through the lens of the Reagan era, defined by corporate dominance, militarization, and the emergence of the culture wars , features that today attain the paroxysm.

Though the Vietnam War was over, the psychic aftermath of both the war and the counterculture’s failure to sustain its radical ideals remained vivid. The novel is thus less an exercise in nostalgia than an inquiry into the collapse of a particular vision of freedom and revolution, exploring the gulf opened between promise and reality.

Pynchon portrays a generation suspended between the remnants of non-conformism and the entrenched conservative order that replaced it, a moment when resistance was simultaneously fragmented, repressed, and co-opted, caught in the constant tension between the desire for transformation and the crushing weight of power structures.

The connection between the two periods is tenuous but not entirely lost. Prairie Wheeler, the fourteen-year-old daughter of former radicals, embodies this fragile continuity. She may not inherit her mother Frenesi Gates’s revolutionary fervor, yet she still inhabits a world shaped by that earlier struggle.

Beneath its comic surface, Vineland exposes the legacy of COINTELPRO-style repression and the ways in which the state systematically dismantled and absorbed anti-establishment dissent. Though that utopian charge has waned, Pynchon suggests that traces persist, in memory, in scattered acts of resistance, and in the absurd resilience of figures like Zoyd Wheeler.

In Vineland, the middle names of Prairie’s parents  –  Frenesi Margaret Gates and Zoyd Herbert Wheeler  – function as covert historical signifiers that condense the ideological shift from the radical ’60s to the neoliberal ’80s. “Margaret” invokes Thatcher and the consolidation of market hegemony, while “Herbert” alludes to Marcuse, emblem of the countercultural Left. Frenesi personifies seduction and betrayal: a onetime radical turned state collaborator, moving from underground film collectives to work for the Nixonian political pornography machine. Zoyd, by contrast, now hapless, aging, and stuck in ritualized rebellion, represents a ghostly trace of that earlier intellectual ferment, now faded into nostalgia and farce. 

Their unlikely union, producing Prairie, allegorizes the fusion of these antagonistic legacies: the utopian impulse of the ’60s  –  the radical vision of a civilization of Eros  – absorbed and neutralized within the hyper-commodified, “post-ideological” landscape of the Reagan era. Through this pairing, Pynchon dramatizes the passage from the utopian and collectivist aspirations of the New Left to the besieged and managed subjectivity of late imperial America.

That’s where the deviations and overlapping between Pynchon’s novel and Anderson’s film come into play. As critic Rory Doherty notes in his review for Time magazine: 

“Apart from their contrasting structural approaches and character backstories, the biggest difference between text and film is setting. Vineland is overflowing with period detail, often ludicrous and sometimes satirically invented, rooted in the history of radicals being expunged by the Nixonian establishment, leading to the inevitable, reductive confines of Reagan’s ‘War on Drugs’ project. But the immediacy of One Battle After Another  – with its ICE-like detention camps, unlawful militias storming American streets, and elites who promote white supremacy in closed-door meetings  – was intended to embellish the spirit of Vineland rather than undermine it.”

Both novel and film imagine the wreckage of American radicalism, but they do so through different narrative devices and angles. In Pynchon’s novel, the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll (PR³) and the film collective 24fps form a paired allegory for the counterculture’s collapse into image and surveillance. In One Battle After Another, the militant faction French 75 re-stages that collapse in a more literal, violent key, turning the mediated irony of Pynchon’s world into a cinematic drama of insurgency and defeat. Taken together, they trace the passage from revolution as festival to revolution as ghost story.

In Vineland, PR³ is born from the irreverent utopian impulse of the ’60s: a college enclave that proclaims itself a sovereign micro-nation of peace, music, and weed. Pynchon renders it with the tone of a deadpan fable: the moment when political desire turns theatrical. Yet its very theatricality bears the imprint of its undoing. The members of the commune are already performing their freedom for the camera, which belongs to 24fps, the film collective that both documents and aestheticizes dissent. When Frenesi, 24fps’s camerawoman, begins filming for the authorities, the line between art and surveillance blurs. The revolution’s dream of visibility curdles into exposure. 

Allegorically, PR³ and 24fps represent the two faces of late-’60s radicalism: the yearning for liberated community and the fatal belief that liberation could be seen , that image was truth. Pynchon suggests that the counterculture’s tragedy lay not in repression alone but in its transformation into spectacle, its incorporation into the media economy it meant to overthrow.

One Battle After Another retools this parable into a more direct historical allegory. Its insurgent cell, French 75, condenses the real-world Weather Underground and similar militant groups that turned from protest to armed struggle. Where PR³ parodies the carnival republic, French 75 enacts the firing squad’s logic, yielding to the twin temptations of moral witness and elite voluntarism: the despairing revolt of a dissident petty-bourgeois group without a popular base.

The film compresses Pynchon’s layered temporality into a streamlined narrative of rise and ruin: bombings, betrayals, the erosion of ideals. Allegorically, French 75 stands for the afterimages of the ’60s, the moment when the spectacle of revolution sought to shatter itself through violence, only to become another genre of entertainment. The movie’s sleek cinematography and rhythmic editing make its very depiction of militancy complicit in the spectacle it critiques, accentuating that in both media ecologies, there is no exit from mediation.

Thus, PR³/24fps and French 75 form a dialectic. If Pynchon’s countercultural rebels are undone by representation, Anderson’s radicals implode in the immediacy of outrage. One is undone by the camera, the other by the gun. Between them unfolds the allegory of American idealism’s decay: the slow drift from communal euphoria to paranoia, from visibility to its weaponization.

By transforming PR³’s stoned republic into French 75’s guerrilla network, One Battle After Another trades Pynchon’s postmodern melancholy for tragic immediacy, yet both works end in the same space: the Reaganite (or Trumpist, it makes no difference) wasteland where rebellion survives only as image, an image that, in Anderson’s hands, intensifies rather than resolves that condition.

In that sense, PR³, 24fps, and French 75 are not different factions but sequential masks of the same fallen dream. Each names a stage in the long allegory of resistance: first the commune, then the camera, then the cell, each crushed, recorded, and replayed, until nostalgia is all that remains.

Yet there is another side to this story. Despite their differing emphases, both book and film are less concerned with simply recalling the past than with imagining how resistance, drawing on past experience, might persist in the present.

In Vineland, Pynchon’s focus on family (Prairie, Zoyd, Frenesi) and on the fragile solidarity of those left behind after the collapse of the counterculture points to the endurance of resistance through everyday care, loyalty, and kinship. If One Battle After Another carries this impulse forward, then what might appear to some viewers as spectacularization becomes instead a cinematic retranslation of that same political energy: a vision of how small solidarities, improvised alliances, and acts of attention persist within the hypermediated landscape of late neoliberalism. The parallel with Vineland might, in this sense, shed further light on this transformation.

Pynchon’s novel moves in the dreamlike, mnemonic, and fragmentary logic that defines his work: memory, transgression, failure, and the not-yet matter as much as the ostensible plot. Dreams and fantasies in Pynchon often operate as latent sites of political desire.

In Vineland, Prairie, the teenage girl yearning to reunite with her mother, stands in for the desire to maintain continuity with a radical past, a past foreclosed amid Reagan’s re-election campaign and by the then already omnipresent Tube (television), yet enduring virtually. Prairie inherits history and its defeats, though not in the same way as her parent’s generation. The crushed utopian energies of the ’60s persist, lingering in the present and waiting for another historical opening.

Watching archival footage of an earlier protest, she feels a belated surge of its lost intensity: 

“Even through the crude old color and distorted sound, Prairie could feel the liberation in the place that night, the faith that anything was possible, that nothing could stand in the way of such joyous certainty. She’d never seen anything like it before.” (Vineland, London: Minerva, 1990, p. 210)

Unlike in other Pynchon novels, where stronger revolutionary dynamics offer some measure of redemption  –  think the rocket counterforce in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) or the anarchists of Against the Day (2006)  – Vineland presents a kind of smaller-scale survival. This has little to do with the survivalism of contemporary ideology; it concerns instead the endurance of a daughter, a broken family, a deferred dream. The novel’s ironic, “sitcom-like” closure signals the collapse of grand revolutionary energies, yet it also preserves the conditions for residual hope, as a not-yet-conscious desire.

Domesticity, seemingly apolitical, acquires a quiet political charge: everyday intimacy  – family, storytelling, solidarity  – carries its own utopian weight, a quiet refusal to surrender to surveillance and state power.

Back to Anderson’s film, reading it solely as a spectacle-driven flattening of utopian potential misses its attention to alternative forms of resistance: the ways family (however dysfunctional), lasting friendship, and the solidarity of margin-walkers operate as loci of present-day political possibility, echoing Vineland’s intimate counterforces.

In both works, “family” does not mean private retreat but a resistant social microstructure. In Vineland, Prairie’s search for her mother and the reconstitution of family becomes an allegory for rebuilding social memory and solidarity among the dispossessed. In One Battle After Another, family or communal ties among marginal figures resist incorporation into spectacle.

The margins, here, are not merely social but ontological , spaces of possibility where people can still act outside pre-scripted media narratives. This is Pynchon’s “counterforce” transposed into the visual register: not heroic revolution but distributed, everyday persistence.

Consider, for instance, Sensei Sergio’s  (Willa’s Latino karate teacher)  quiet kindness, resourcefulness, and composure, each put to work within the underground network protecting undocumented immigrants from fascist violence. Also, in the same sequence of this whole alternative organization of urban daily life  – one of the film’s highpoints –, the row-on-skateboard shot: youth in motion becomes a visual motif for marginality and improvisation, recalling the latent, restless energies of Pynchon’s world.

Skateboarding and urban or suburban youth culture resurge here as a figurative synthesis of life pulsating through camaraderie, rebellion, freedom, and the survival of alternative social spaces within rigidly structured, often oppressive environments. Like Prairie’s navigation of domestic and marginal spaces in Vineland, these fleeting moments of youthful mobility suggest the ongoing possibility of living otherwise, of asserting autonomy and solidarity under conditions that would otherwise constrain and surveil. In such gestures, Anderson’s new film finds its quiet politics: not the spectacle of sacrifice, but the slow labour of care. Not, therefore, a revolution televised, but one quietly sustained, in movement, memory, and ongoing attention.

Still, as Richard Brody recently noted in The New Yorker, whereas films such as Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) sustained a documentary rapport with real activists and with the immediate experience of the political action they depict, One Battle After Another privileges instead the register of affective labor, resulting, according to the critic, in a film that is at once “brilliant and hollow”, “a vision of hopeful possibilities” yet “unmoored from realities”.

What may appear as vacuity, however, is less a failure of the film than the index of an objective impasse. The absence of direct “revolutionary labor” reflects the very logic of late neoliberalism, in which collective action, in the context of displaced industrialization and hyperproductivity, has been utterly fragmented, depleted, and aestheticized.

Ultimately, both Vineland and One Battle After Another converge in the imagination of a politics of the remainder, a politics of what persists when the grand narratives of emancipation seem exhausted. Pynchon had already intuited, amid the conservative backlash of the ’80s, that resistance would survive less as armed insurgency than as residual energy, dispersed through everyday gestures of care, memory, and solidarity. Anderson, in turn, translates this intuition into the visual regime of the twenty-first century, in which total mediation and spectacle have replaced direct experience. His wager is that pockets of meaning and community can still be cultivated within this regime: autonomous zones of affect and attention, where politics is relearned as a patient and shared practice.

Far from standing in opposition to collective organization, these zones may in fact be more closely in tune with forms of control of economic power devised by and for the working class, rooted in networks of material solidarity, mutual care, and the democratic reappropriation of urban space, and the available resources and means of production and survival.

What the film inherits from Vineland is not merely disillusionment, but the persistence of the possible in a time when we seem unable to see even a hand’s breadth ahead: a minimal utopia, that insists on germinating beneath the ruins of the spectacle.

[A previous version of this piece appeared in Portuguese on A Terra é Redonda]

Brussels, circa 2004

On the Intoxication of Youth and Fleeting Infinities

We sowed in youth a mustard seed,/ We cut an almond rod;/ We are now grown up to riper age:/ Are they withered in the sod?/ Are they blighted, failed and faded,/ Are they mouldered back to clay? (the Brontës)

A few luminous sequences in a film can cast a glow over the whole, transforming what might have left us indifferent into something distinct. In A Complete Unknown, within the shoebox dimensions of Dylan’s apartment – especially in those scenes circling the Cuban Missile Crisis – the dust and daylight conspire just so, sending me skidding down a wormhole to Brussels, around 2004, a time suspended in the aftermath of the great alter-globalization and anti-war protests, a moment that, in hindsight, rhymes more with 1962 than with anything that followed (specially after 2008, where everything started to go awry at an accelerated pace).

No television (no one seemed to take notice that it even existed), no internet (or barely: we checked our emails once or twice a week, at a call center, keeping online surfing to a minimum; it cost 50 cents per half-hour, money we’d rather spend on things that actually mattered), a phone, sure, portable in theory but mostly inert (with no cameras in hand, people seldom attempted to capture the living strand: pin-down a butterfly, and its wings forget the sky...).

Nobody seemed to really work. Money, when it appeared, vanished in an instant, funneled into booze & books. But somehow, that precarious edge of existence made everything shimmer. Reading like a beatnik, writing in a fever, making love to girls with names like forgotten poems, slipping in and out of second-hand bookstores where the yellowed pages carried the magical scent of new discoveries, the cinémathèque screening Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, or some New Wave deep cut, a jazz jam veering toward the sublime before collapsing into utter chaos, a friend’s apartment swelling nightly with bodies, bottles, and smoke, surrounded by a sea of possibility, moving beyond isolation through bright, bouncing synths, in the wild, surreal glam of moonage daydreams, the city itself, lights that never go out, unfolding in endless late-night conversations, each a whispered conspiracy against whatever dawn might bring...

Life had this lazy, unhurried rhythm, like it was stretching out, inhaling deep. We sprawled across the Grand Place like it was a secret we’d discovered, cheap beers sweating in our hands, the guilds catching the final rays of sunlight, shimmering in a way that felt like a half-remembered dream from some old Flemish painter, no panic about the passage of time, just this quiet, unspoken certainty that this moment, this exact moment, was infinite. 

Our Brussels was a polyphonic mestizo city where the notion of race held no dominion; a fleeting glimpse of a democratic oasis unsullied by commerce or greed (to borrow a phrase from Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic), drawing wandering souls from across the globe: Angola, Argentina, Brazil, Cyprus, France, Germany, Ghana, Morocco, Martinique, Syria, Vietnam... In the many vernissages, encounters that felt like verses coming to life, fragments of poetry walking, speaking, unfolding in gestures, in glances that lingered just long enough to suggest entire unwritten stories. In the squats, their boots barely leaving the floor, pretty punkettes danced as if channeling some ancient, forgotten ritual. The music then – a collision of intensity, longing, rebellion, and transcendence – sounded like the emotional landscape of life-altering years, a soundtrack of raw desire, poetic defiance, dreamy evasion, pulling at something – an electric current – just beneath the surface of the night. And for a while, we believed – we knew – that we were perched at the edge of something vast, unnamed, vital. A threshold. A signal just beyond reach. Was the belief – that knowledge – the thing itself?

The countless difficult morning-afters, naturally, would perform their usual alchemy, softening the edges, thinning the thing out like smoke drifting on a breeze that never manages to touch the earth. But come nightfall, it would creep back, murmuring it hadn’t gone anywhere, one of those subterranean moods, lurking in the unseen places, waiting, unreadable, to be stumbled upon when the time was ripe, a time that never quite came, always just out of reach, like a horizon that keeps retreating the closer you get, until at last it simply flickered, wavered, and dissolved like a mirage. 

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call Brussels back then, like Fitzgerald with his lost city, my lost city, but looking at it today – overcrowded with tourists, armed forces patrolling with machine guns, the homeless growing exponentially in number, gunfights almost weekly, violent flare-ups between rival soccer supporters on a regular basis, young minds too busy scrolling to imagine a life beyond the screen – it’s hard not to feel a stir, some quiet ache. I don’t mean to veer into deceptive nostalgia, the siren song of better days that never fully were, but damn, when everything’s unraveled into the gigantic quagmire we’re stuck in today, you start to think maybe looking back to times like that isn’t the worst instinct; if nothing else, that half-remembered dream of the possibility of another world – back then still in the air – may whisper of other paths, half-lit and long overgrown, yes, but never fully gone...

The Hard Core of a Visionary Failure

On The Brutalist, or: A Blueprint for a Better Film

I decided to give The Brutalist a go the other night, despite the scathing reviews and overenthusiastic praise I had been reading, neither of which inspired confidence.

It wouldn’t be hard to explain why I didn’t like it. It’s riddled with loose ends, drags unnecessarily (I have no issue with long films, if the runtime is justified), and is overcooked in its ambition (I welcome ambition, as long as it delivers). It’s also annoyingly over-explanatory, to the point of patronizing the viewer. Do we really need an upside-down Statue of Liberty in the opening scene to foreshadow the downside of the American Dream? Do we need a verbal explanation that opium is addictive to grasp the protagonist’s struggles with the slaving habit?

But rather than listing its many flaws, I’d rather critique The Brutalist from the ruins of the good film it could have been.

Much has been said about The Brutalist’s use of VistaVision, but I can’t help but see it as fundamentally at odds with both the aesthetics and politics of Brutalism. Brady Corbet justifies the choice by saying that using a 1950s-engineered format helps immerse the viewer in that era, a valid argument if the goal were mere nostalgia. Yet Brutalism wasn’t about looking backward, quite the contrary.

Brutalism was raw, functional, and unvarnished, marked by exposed concrete, heavy massing, modular spaces, and an absence of decorative flourishes. VistaVision, on the other hand, is the complete opposite: a highly polished, immersive, hyperreal format designed to enhance visual clarity and depth, often used to capture grand, sweeping beauty with rich color and a sense of sumptuousness. It smooths out the rough edges, makes everything tonic, expansive, and like a painting.

Brutalism wasn’t about classical compositions and aesthetic perfection; it was about mass, social contradictions, and dynamic human experience. But The Brutalist turns it into a historical postcard, sanitizing its radicality. Instead of embracing Brutalism’s stark, defiant materiality, the film aestheticizes it into something detached from its political function. Soviet Constructivist cinematography – drawing from Dziga Vertov or Sergei Eisenstein – would have been a bolder choice, with its low angles, deep shadows, and exaggerated perspectives, better suited to capturing the architecture’s weight and presence rather than reducing it to an inert backdrop.

The film shows a flicker of awareness in its use of 16mm for documentary-style footage and Digital Betacam for the epilogue’s TV segment, but it never fully commits. Had it been shot in grainy, tactile, imperfect textures, it might have created a visual language that felt more like Brutalist concrete, rather than Hollywood grandeur.

Brutalism has long suffered from being misrepresented as cold, authoritarian, and oppressive, when it was the opposite: a radical response to capitalism’s failures, designed for public good, committed to communal experience and social equality. Beyond providing efficient and equitable housing with available resources, it aspired to a form of communal luxury.

As Owen Hatherley writes in Militant Modernism, British New Brutalists, like the ‘angry young’ Smithsons, working with raw materials at hand, aimed at creating architectural solutions that would unashamedly house the poor and at the same time be glamorous, ‘an architecture both of austerity and abundance, in line with the contradictions of the post-1945 melange of Socialism and Capitalism that created the post-war boom’. The Brutalist completely misunderstands this, tying Brutalism to personal trauma and aestheticized suffering, collapsing it into a story of individual grief rather than radical collective possibility.

Nowhere is this misreading more unsettling than in Tóth’s decision to model the Van Buren Institute on the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald, a place designed to dehumanize and exterminate millions of human beings. Even if it were meant as a deliberate provocation, a way of forcing people to confront the painful past, it would still be unfit (to say the least) for the purposes of a community center, typically a space of refuge and social connection. Furthermore, it undermines Brutalism’s core principles, which had nothing whatsoever to do with memorializing trauma, but rather with breaking from oppressive structures and envisioning new ones. Tóth’s project isn’t an architectural response to human needs; it’s a haunted echo of past horrors, reinforcing their weight rather than transcending them.

In the final take, Brutalism is presented as a relic, displayed at the Venice Biennale, an exclusionary setting deeply embedded in the parallel universe of high-art, where architecture is preserved as spectacle rather than integrated into daily life. By the time the epilogue takes place, in the beginning of the neoliberal era, Modernist solutions in general, and Brutalism in particular, were far from being celebrated (just ask Tom Wolfe!), they were being demolished, the whole social project actively dismantled – through neglect, privatization, and political shifts away from public investment in housing and infrastructure.

If anything, the ending should have led us to ask: ‘What did we lose by abandoning these ideals? By giving up collective solutions?’ Instead, it sounds like the film just shrugs and says: ‘That’s all, folks!’

Ironically, the only scene that seems to embody Brutalist ideals isn’t about architecture at all; it’s the jazz jam session.

Among other things, Brutalism was about creating spaces for diverse communities to coexist and interact: massive residential complexes built for working-class people, communal spaces integrated into the structure itself. It embraced imperfection, roughness, and stark contrasts. It was experimental, and anti-bourgeois. Jazz, at its best, would be in a way the musical equivalent: improvisational, innovative, intense, constantly bending sonic structures, breaking through social barriers. As Jacques Attali has pointed out in Noise, by rejecting conformity to the repetitive patterns dominating the post-war cultural landscape, jazz in the late '50s and '60s paved the way for a new mode of musical production. 

The jam session scene, where marginalized communities – Black musicians, Jewish émigrés, sex workers, and drug users – come together in a liberated space, mirrors somehow the social utopian design that most Brutalist architecture aspired to. It’s beautifully raw and alive, a radically democratic realm, where differences are sublated in unfettered collective creation.

Under the spell of a Mingus-like sound, it’s the one moment where the film’s world feels alive, where people aren’t just suffering in beautifully framed shots but actually living in defiance of the oppressive structures around them. The jazz scene succeeds where the rest of the movie fails; it shows what Brutalist spaces were meant to foster, rather than mourning their supposed blunder.

The otherworldly Carrara marble quarry sequence – filmed with such craft, with the Italian partigiano’s story being told in the background – echoes the jazz scene in its poetic and political intensity, creating a moment of solidarity between the wretched – the Jewish architect and the anti-fascist anarchist artisan – both negatively shaped by the experience of the war. The quarry, already a site heavy with symbolism (extraction, exploitation, brutal labor conditions), becomes for a minute almost an allegory of an alter world. The scene suggests a possible counterpoint to the film’s broader narrative of manipulation and sorrow; a moment in which creation, resistance, and lived experience align in an act of shared defiance and beauty.

But then, this is bluntly shattered by an act of sexual abuse, a narrative misstep that weakens the film’s own critique. If we think about its storyline economy, what each scene contributes to the whole, the scene feels gratuitous rather than revelatory. If the goal was to show Tóth’s breaking point, hadn’t his years of psychological and economic subjugation under the patronage of Van Buren already established that? Instead of letting the political weight of the scene breathe, the film forces a moral collapse, as if it didn’t trust us to grasp Tóth’s suffering unless it’s pushed to the extreme.

The free-association between the ideas of Brutalism and brutality was already advanced and explored – way more successful if I may add – more than 50 years ago in Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, filmed partially at the Southmere Estate in Thamesmead. In The Brutalist, however, it doesn’t add depth but reduces the complexity of power and coercion to another victimization trope.

The film had already built an effective critique of how power operates subtly, through favor, economic dependence, and artistic compromise in a capitalist society, but by inserting this sudden physical brutality, it shifts focus away from those more insidious, systemic forces.

Had the director trusted the strength of scenes like the jazz jam and the quarry sequence to carry their own weight, it could have provided a radical counterpoint to Van Buren’s world – the world of privilege, narcissism, and exceptionalism of the ultra-rich – a glimpse of what art, labor, and solidarity might look like outside the logic of profit and exploitation. Instead, the intrusion of sexual violence collapses those possibilities, reducing moments of potential dissent into yet another iteration of victimhood and suffering.

Even worse: instead of confronting the master, the offended, tellingly, turns against his fellow exploited, including Gordon, the Black co-worker he befriended at the start of his American journey, and who vanishes from the screen just as inexplicably as Van Buren at the end.

At its best, The Brutalist had the potential to explore the tension between artistic vision and capitalist patronage, between radical architecture and its later misinterpretation. But instead of engaging with these contradictions, it romanticizes, aestheticizes, and ultimately misunderstands its own subject, painting Brutalism as mere historical relic, in lieu of a political statement, a vision of the future that never came to be. The movie doesn't challenge the neoliberal erasure of that alternative future; it accepts it rather, as if it were inevitable. And that, more than anything, is its greatest failure.